Hebrews Lesson 161
May 28, 2009
NKJ Psalm 119:9 How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to Your
word.
We’ll begin near where we left off
last time in Hebrews 10:24.
Now when we come to this last part
of Hebrews 10 there are these three distinct commands that are given in what is
called the hortatory subjunctive which is usually a first person plural where
the writer includes himself in the action. This is recognizing he has as
much responsibility to fulfill these commands as those that he is
addressing. He’s stating this in what would be a first person imperative
although you really don’t have a first person imperative as such in the
language. But that’s how the hortatory subjunctive works. “Let us do
this” means we must do this, we should do this. So when you come to the
last part of this one section of Hebrews 10:24-25 this includes the teaching
section that began in 7:1. It’s concluding with these three mandates. The
three mandates begin:
NKJ Hebrews 10:22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith,.
Focusing on our personal fellowship,
relationship with God based on being in fellowship, forgiveness.
having our
hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water
The picture there is of that
positional cleansing that takes place as a result of salvation,
justification.
Second, moving on beyond simple
justification to the next command:
NKJ Hebrews 10:23 Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who
promised is faithful.
I said that is holding on to basic
doctrine. It has amazed me. In fact I was having a conversation
yesterday with my good friend Tommy Ice. We were bemoaning the fact we
could not understand how so many people we have known over the years have
departed from dispensationalism or free grace gospel or even the philosophy of
ministry that the role of the church is to be teaching environment. They’re
off into all kinds of church growth gimmicks or they never even mention the
word dispensationalism or prophecy or anything much beyond very basic pabulum;
all for various reasons. That’s what they’ve done. They’ve given
up. They have not held fast to the confession that they were given.
When I think back on my life and I
think back on the teaching that I received from the pulpit at Berachah Church
where I grew up, when I think of the teaching that I heard when I went to Camp
Peniel, Many of my counselors and many of speakers that came were on
their way to either the pastoral ministry or the mission field. A lot of
them had also come out of Berachah Church. So there was a consistency in
the teaching and there was a solid emphasis. I look back to what I was
taught, handed as it were, a body of doctrine from those men and the teachers I
had at Dallas Seminary. Then you come along now and you look at what is
taught, what is emphasized and you just wonder: what happened?
And many people who of those same
people who were teaching one thing and had one philosophy back in the 60’s and
70’s are no longer there. They’ve moved. They’ve got different
ideas. They’ve changed in some way. You wonder what in the world happened
to cause this? See they haven’t held fast to that confession of faith.
I think in many ways we see in our
world today where people don’t really understand what they believe and why they
believe it. Those two things really have to go together. Sometimes
they’re taught a “what”, but they never really understand the “why.” They
don’t understand the exegesis that underlies the position. Sometimes they
don’t really understand the position they’ve held. In some cases they get
hit with a situation in life, some kind of testing or tragedy. Sometimes
they get faced with disappointment. I know that the pastors who have faced
various disappointments in the ministry. They had high hopes. They
had great ambitions. They had tremendous talents. Then things didn’t
work out and God was taking them through the wilderness. Rather than being
patient in their wilderness testing, they decided they needed to somehow figure
out how to bring water to the desert and how to make the desert bloom in all
these other things through manmade gimmicks. So rather than waiting
patiently on the Lord and teaching the Truth, they started changing, modifying,
diluting in order to somehow get a greater hearing, get more people
there. Maybe they thought dispensationalism is not very popular so I’m not
even going to talk about that or things of that nature and so were just
beginning to dumb down what came out of the pulpit. Those are some examples of
those who have not held fast that confession of hope without wavering.
Then the third command is:
NKJ Hebrews 10:24 And let us consider one another in order to stir up love
and good works,
That’s your basic command which we
began to look at last time in verse 24. I just want to review the emphasis
here. The word translated “consider” is the Greek word katanoeo. The kata is a preposition that intensifies the meaning of the main verb
which is noeo. You’ve heard the
Greek word nous which refers to the
mind. Katanoeo has to do with an
intensified form of thinking. Noeo
is also thought; but when you put the kata
in front of it, it intensifies the meaning. It has that idea that we
should give some intense serious focused thought to something.
It’s the old activity of
brainstorming. I don’t know if you ever went through that activity, but
you are trying to solve a problem or face a situation. So you sit down and
start cranking out ideas and sometimes if you get with a couple of other
people; you are trying to work through a situation. Then there is sort of
a synergism that occurs there that occurs with other people. You begin to
come up with different ideas and play off each other. That’s the idea
here. It’s giving some serious thought and contemplation to a course of
action and it involves one another. It involves the body of Christ.
Now this idea that we’re going to
see a little more fully tonight on the “one another” isn’t just talking about
getting together with other believers down at Starbucks where you can enjoy a
good cup of bitter coffee – over-roasted coffee in my opinion, unless
it’s iced coffee. I love their iced coffee, but their other stuff I think
is a little over-roasted. You can talk to friends. You can go to a
restaurant, work out together, go shooting together. You can do all kinds
of things with other believers, but that’s not the “one another” idea that we
have from Paul. It’s not just believers getting together to do things.
Those can all be great and wonderful
things and we all enjoy that kind of social engagement with other
believers. Sometimes it really does become Christian fellowship because we
start talking about things related to the Word and the Christian life and we
can encourage each other. But that isn’t the idea here because when we get
into the next verse (into verse 25) where there is the negative and positive
presented and the negative is “not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together”,
we’ll see the word forsake means to abandon or to give up the assembling
together.
That is from the Greek word episunagoge. Now what word do you
think we speak of in English that we get from sunagoge? Synagogue. To whom is the writer of Hebrews
speaking? To Jews. So when they hear this word, this verb episunagoge and they’re going to be
thinking specifically about the gathering together in the synagogue. The
assembly of believers as it was in the Old Testament for the purpose of
studying the Word, prayer, worship and also mutual encouragement. The use
of the vocabulary here is not talking about other kinds of ways in which we get
together socially with believers; but it’s talking about how we get together
within the specific context of the meeting of the local church, the meeting
with other believers for the primary purpose of the teaching of the Word of
God.
But there are secondary objectives
that are set forth for the meeting of the church as we’ll see over the next
couple of weeks as we go through various passages such as 1 Corinthians 12,
Ephesians 4, and a couple of other places in Acts. The idea here of
“considering” is stirring up one another in context of this assembling together
for a particular purpose.
That’s where this is taking
place. It’s not taking place down at the local coffee shop or restaurant;
but it’s taking place within the context of the meeting of the local church and
is a by-product of the study of the Word. I think it’s very important
because people forget that. I think every decade there are people, there
are seminary professors and pastors that come up with new ideas on how to make
the church more dynamic, more fun so your church can grow – things like
that. There are always these kinds of renewal movements. Sometimes they’re
needed because the church stagnates, gets away from doctrine. Sometimes
people think the church has stagnated because they’re really tired of learning
doctrine. They don’t think doctrine works anymore so we have to do
something to placate the masses out there and we have to understand what they
want and give them what they want and then our church can grow. And if
it’s growing that means God must be blessing.
I can’t tell you how many people
believe that. That is the established presupposition of their thinking is
that if a church grows from 50 people to 500 people to 5,000 people that God
has blessed us. But one of the pastors that I studied under at one time
and who ordained me made a comment one time.
He said, “Anybody with personality
and drive and business knowhow can build any organization to be
successful. That doesn’t mean that God the Holy Spirit had anything to do
with it.”
So size and numbers of a local
church don’t have anything to do with whether God is blessing that local
church. There are many people who in the energy of the flesh can go out
and build huge churches. You can drive up and down the freeways in Houston
or Dallas or Washington or any major city and you can see these monuments to
the flesh. No doctrine is being taught there and in some cases they might
get the gospel right on occasion because the stopped watch is right at least
twice a day. So it just happens by chance. But it’s not
intentional.
Some of the stories that I hear
about what’s going on in some of the larger churches around Houston are enough
to make you want to think that people have lost their common sense. I
heard of one church where the pastor was telling the congregation that all
their energy, all their programs, everything are going to focus on younger people;
on the 30’s and the 40’s. Basically what was communicated nonverbally was
that if you’re older and you don’t like the kind of music and formats that
appeal to those in their 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s; then well you’re just going to
have to learn to adapt. That’s silly. I mean the strength of any
local church are the mature people and the mature people are older
people. The mature believers are going to be older believers. They’re
going to be men and women in their 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s who in many cases
have seen all these fads come and go; and they have real wisdom to understand
what needs to be taught is the Word of God.
So we see these fads and these
different things come along every decade or so; and they come up with ideas on
how we can be more loving. There’s always new gimmicks for how to be more
loving. Sometimes they operate within what they’ll call anything from a
mini-church to a fellowship church to a home group. Small groups are the
big rage. They have been for about 30 years now. That’s where the
real life of the church is in the small groups whether that’s Sunday school or
whether that’s home church meetings.
In fact if you buy Logos with all
the basic stuff in there, there are a whole bunch of books about leading small
groups and developing small groups and how to teach small groups. It’s
small groups this and small groups that. It’s all about methodology and
gimmicks and that kind of thing rather than just teaching the Word. It’s the
Word that’s the focus and that people need to be drawn to the Word.
You have these other ways in which
we can show that we love each other. It comes across as a phony. One
of the emphasis that I learned a number of years ago as a pastor (and my
philosophy of ministry) is that things of that nature need to come out of the
spiritual growth of the congregation not to be imposed by the pastor or the
leader saying we need to be a loving church so we’re going to set up a
committee and that committee is in charge of taking care of all the visitors. Or
we want to make sure that all the young families recognize that we care about
them so we’re going to do this kind of thing. It comes across as a phony
program, some sort of top-down-engineered idea in order to make people feel
welcomed, make people feel loved all of these things rather than just teaching
the Word and teaching people to understand what that interpersonal dynamic
should be among a body of mature, growing believers who are genuinely out of
their own spiritual growth loving one another, caring for one another, and
taking care of one another and all those “one another” passages that we’re
going to look at. It’s not a result of programs. It’s a result of the
study of the Word of God and spiritual growth under the guidance of God the Holy
Spirit. That produces that sort of genuine application that is so often lost.
People run around trying to capture that in one way or another and it almost
always leads to some kind of a problem.
So we are to consider one another in
order to stir up love and good works. I pointed out that the Word for
stirring up is the Greek word paroxusmos
where we get the English word paroxysm. It means to arouse to activity, to
provoke action in some cases to provoke sharp disagreement to produce ardent
incitement or to stir to action. It has a variety of meanings. The
basic idea is people respond to the teaching of the Word and then they get
excited from their own enthusiasm about the Word, not a manufactured excitement
or emotion because that won’t last long.
Then they begin to talk to other
believers within that dynamic and think about – well, what can we
do? How we get involved, using our spiritual gifts, going down maybe to
the hospital visiting people, setting up a Bible study with children in the
neighborhood, whatever it is. But it grows out of their own response to
God’s Word. It’s not something manufactured from the outside or from the
leadership.
Then the writer qualifies what he
means in his main command to think deeply about how to stir up one another. He’s
going to use two participles. The first shows a negation and the other shows
something positive.
If you look at them one says:
NKJ Hebrews 10:25 not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together,
as is the manner of some,
And on the other hand:
but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you
see the Day approaching.
So you see when you put them
together the “assembling together” is related to exhorting one another. If
you’re not assembled together in the sense of the meeting of the local church;
then the framework for exhorting or encouraging one another isn’t there. That’s
why this isn’t’ talking about what’s happening down at Starbucks or what’s
happening at Burger King or down at the gym or someplace such as that.
So there’s a prohibition, a warning
here, because some of these Jewish believers, Jewish background believers have
given it up. They’ve quit meeting with other believers. If you’re not
meeting with a local church where you’re hearing the Word of God and you’re
being encouraged by the fact that there are other people there; then what
happens is you’re not in a place where you can be reminded by the Word of God,
reinforced by the Holy Spirit and encouraged by relationships with other
believers.
I’m not saying that other believers
are key to your spiritual grow. Your spiritual growth is determined by
your volition. But God created us to be social. That doesn’t mean
that the church is a social institution.
One of my little pet peeves over the
years has been that when you read church pastoral ministry literature, the
tendency for the last 50 years is to interpret the church as primarily a social
organization that has secondary educational aspects. But when you read the
Word of God especially passages like Ephesians 4 that the gift of pastor
teacher and evangelist are given to equip the saints to do the work of the
ministry, other passages talking about teaching, training, instruction. The
focus of the local church is on education. The social aspects will take care of
themselves because God created us in His image. Part of the “imageness” of
God is that capacity for relationship and God existed as a social being for all
eternity within the society of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. So
at the very core of that relationship that 3-fold relationship when the
Scripture talk about the fact that God is love; He is love unlike any other God
that man manufactured such as Allah. God is eternally love because there is an
eternal object for His love. The Father has an eternal object in the love
of the Son. The Son has an eternal object in the love of the Father. The
Holy Spirit has eternal objects in the Father and the Son. So there is
this eternal dynamic of a society of a social dynamic within the trinity.
So when God creates man, He doesn’t
man to be socially isolated from one another. Mankind is designed for
social interaction and to encourage one another in a positive way. Of
course that like anything else can be distorted and perverted. But when
you are in a classroom and I argue this when I talk about the problems I see
with internet learning, internet seminary classes, distance
learning. That’s good in some ways. There is always the inconvenience
of having to pack your bags, move across the state, move to the next state,
move half way across the country to go some place to be trained and get your
education to be a pastor.
So many men think, “Well, I’m
married now and I’ve got a baby on the way.” Or, “I just married and
I’ve got a job and I just can’t see how God is going to open the door for
me to move to Albuquerque or to Washington DC area (Capital Bible Seminary)”,
or some other place where they can get a seminary training. So they think
they can get it on the internet.
There is an intangible, immeasurable
element a necessary element that takes place in a man’s education when he is
sitting in a room with other men with the gift of pastor teacher and they’re
studying Greek that cannot be replaced when they’re sitting in their office
somewhere in front of their computer isolated from these other
individuals. There is a dynamic that takes place when you’re with these
men and you leave class and say, “Man I just don’t understand this.”
Some other guy says, “It’s
simple.” And he explains it in a way that’s much better than what the
professor just did
Or, you get together and
study. I had a group of men my first year in seminary that had lunch
together every day. In those days Dallas Seminary had Lamb Auditorium, which
would seat about 250. They didn’t have a cafeteria or lunchroom and they had
built this about 3 years before I started seminary. We would go in there
and we would pull the chairs out into a circle and we would sit there with out
sandwiches and our cokes and we had our 3 by 5 cards with all the notes we had
taken on the reading for the assignment the night before. Now the class that
came up after that had everybody in our class in there which was about 200
men. We would sit there and we would drill each other over the 30 or 40
pages of reading that was due that day because we always had a quiz on the
reading before class. You would have a ten-question quiz.
The book that we had for that class
was An Old Testament Introduction by
R. K. Harrison. On most of the pages, half the page was fine print
footnotes. Half the questions on the quiz would come out of the
footnotes. So you had to know every piece of minutia that was in those 30
to 40 pages of reading. The prof would only ask ten questions. So the
only way to make it through was for a group of 5 or 6 guys to get together with
all the notes they had taken on 3 by 5 cards and drill each other for an hour
before class and ask any possible question that we could.
That’s comparable to this dynamic
that the writer of Hebrews is talking about here with this interaction in the
body of Christ. Like I said, this isn’t the kind of thing that you’ll see
in some churches. There have been churches like…Ray Stedman had Peninsula Bible
Church. He’s with the Lord now. He had Peninsula Bible Church out in
the San Francisco area through much of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. He came
out with a book called Body Life. This
was the new gimmick in the 70’s.
“We’re going to minimize the role of
the pastor and we’re just going to have these meetings of the church where all
the of the church with their different spiritual gifts do different
things.”
But the edification comes from the
Word of God. That made everybody feel important so that had it’s
popularity and the church was a couple of thousand. That was one of the
big churches. Because he did so well, Dallas Seminary always tended to
parade Ray Stedmen out as one of the great graduates of Dallas Seminary. “Look
how God blessed his ministry.”
There were many good things about
Stedman’s ministry; but that was one of those kinds of trendy things that have
come along in the past 30 years that try to take passages like this and do
something different that creates this artificial type of body life. That’s
not at all what I’m talking about. This is a dynamic that comes as a
result of people just genuinely enthused about the study of the Word.
Some of you remember times when you
were in Bible churches and doctrinal churches when it was an exciting happening
place. After Bible class people got together and they would go talk about
things and what they had learned in Bible class that night. And it was
exciting. They couldn’t wait to be back the next night. That’s the
kind of dynamic that’s going on here where it all centers around the meeting of
the local church.
Now on this slide I’ve got at the
bottom three of the key Greek words that are here. The first word egkataleipo is the word that’s
translated not forsaking. It means to leave something, to leave it
behind, to forsake it, to abandon it; basically to quit getting together with
other believers in the study of God’s Word. That’s always at the center of
the understanding here.
NKJ Hebrews 10:25 not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together,
as is the manner of some,
They had these Jews under the
pressure of persecution and rejection; and it’s not popular. Their Jewish
family and friends would not have anything to do with them. They were
peeling off and they weren’t assembling with others anymore. When you go
through tough times - sometimes you don’t want to be around other people. But
it encourages you. Just the fact that you see other people that are there,
tells you that “it’s not just me.”
That’s one of the problems I have
with streaming video. I think it’s a great thing when you have people in
this town who have difficulty getting here on Tuesday night or Thursday night
because sometimes it is difficult because of work schedules and other
things. But sometimes it’s just too convenient to not make the effort to
go to Bible class two nights a week. Some of you remember going to Bible
class 5 nights a weeks and three times on Sunday. Now let’s just stay home
this one other night during the week and live stream. When you have a
crowd of 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 people in here, the dynamic that comes from seeing
a hundred people in this room as opposed to the dynamic of seeing 25 or 30 here
every night has an impact on us.
We may say, “Well, you know we
really shouldn’t. That’s putting eyes on people.”
But that’s the way man’s made. We
are encouraged by the fact that – look at these other people. We
can’t see the number of people that are out there. In the old days of
cassette tapes when you had orders coming in, you could write up a nice report
at the end of the year and say we sent out, we filled an average of a thousand
or three thousand or 5 thousand tape orders last month. But now when everything
is downloaded off the internet, we have no clue how many are
listening. It’s surprising. I think there are a lot out there but I have
no idea of measuring that. It’s probably a good thing that I don’t have any
idea. But we get encouraged by knowing that we’re not here fighting this
battle alone.
I think that’s one of the side
benefits of the Chafer Seminary Pastor’s Conference. All of a sudden there
are people who realize that there are a lot of good solid doctrinal teaching
pastors all over this country and not all of them come to that conference. This
last year I think we had between 45 and 50 - that’s the most we’ve had and I’m
talking since about at least 1975. I think that’s about the most we’ve
ever had at a pastor’s conference. And then were another 15 or 20 who were
involved in some kind of auxiliary church ministry as a seminary professor or a
missionary or something like that. They get together and these men get
together and they realize there are other men who are facing some of the same
challenges that they’re facing in churches. And some of them are just
practical challenges.
“I’ve got 5 teenagers in my church,
but I need to have a teen class. But when you have 5 teenagers and this week
they’re all there. Next week there’s a football game and one guy shows
up.”
The dynamic is lost. The next
week he doesn’t want to come because he’s the only guy. So three others
show up, but he doesn’t show up.
They are saying, “Well, what about
so and so?”
There is a dynamic that doesn’t work
there. So should we have a Friday night teen class? How do we do
this? These are important questions and good questions and guys get to
realize that other men are struggling with those same thing. Some of these
guys solve the problems.
“Hey that’s a great solution.
I’m going to try that when I go back.”
The goal is not to try programs or
gimmicks or get more kids there. It’s that somehow we need to get our
teens in front of the Bible on a regular basis so that they can be strengthened
and prepared to face the problems in life that come that along after you leave
home.
The negative command here is not to
forsake. You can’t do it. You cannot consider one another to
stimulate them to love and good deeds if you’re forsaking the assembly of
ourselves together. So you can’t do it by not assembling. But you do
it by assembling and encouraging one another. This is a word we’ll see
several times in the passages we’re going to look at in a minute.
The word here is parakaleo. It means to summon, to
invite, to exhort, to encourage, to implore. It has a range of
meaning. Sometimes it’s a form of teaching, exhorting somebody. That’s
where we get our word hortatory from exhort. It has that idea of challenging
people. I like that word better than I do exhort. It means to challenge
people with the truth of God’s Word and their responsibility as
believers. And we do that in many ways with others.
Now let me say a word of
warning. As you go through this there are all these little caveats that I
have to put in here because there are always people who don’t know how to engage
socially with other people. The more we get into our internet age and our
self-absorbed narcissistic culture; we find people have to be taught how to
have relationships. When I’ve done marriage counseling that is 90% of the
problem. They don’t know how to have good manners toward each other. They
don’t know how to listen to each other. They don’t know how to talk to
each other. They don’t know how to have a relationship with another human
being. They don’t know how to handle disagreement because they’ve never
had that kind of training. As we get more and more removed from our roots
in this country with little parental discipline and all you’re raising is a
bunch of children who are hyper narcissists then when they get married and you
get two little hyper narcissists who’ve never had to control their sin nature
in their life, that marriage is going to last about 6 months or two years and
it’s going to be pretty miserable. A lot of marriage counseling is nothing
more than teaching people how to be a friend, how to have good relationships,
how to deal with people with good manners and basic socialization 101.
So that’s part of what’s involved in
a local church and pastoring. You have to warn people though not to do
certain things. When you have relationships with people, when you have
friendships - just think about your own life. You have three or four different
what I call circles of intimacy. You have 3 or 4 close friends,
maybe. Sometimes you might have one depending on a lot of different
factors. But you have one person with whom you can discuss just about
anything in your life. That’s your most intimate level. Sometimes
that’s only your spouse. Sometimes it’s your spouse; sometimes you have
another close friend. Sometimes some of us live in places where we have
friends that we have grown up with. We’re still in the geographic area
where we grew up and so we have some old friends and close friends that we can
be very intimate with. But a lot of people don’t have that.
Then you have another circle that’s
not quite as intimate. These are people that you see on a fairly regular
basis. You may socialize with them. You may work out with them. You may
play sports with them, go golfing with them, go shopping with them, different
things of that nature. And so there’s another level of intimacy.
Then there’s a level of intimacy
that involves people that you might see on a regular basis. You see them at
church 3 or 4 times a week. You see them at the office and work almost
every day. You know some things about them and their personal
life. They know some things about you and your personal life; but you
really don’t get into a lot of each other’s lives or business. And it
needs to stay that way. You don’t want some of those people knowing
anything more about you. Maybe you don’t even like them knowing as much as
they do know about you.
Then there’s a level where you just
barely have acquaintances. You know their names. You see them; you
recognize them. Those are the levels of intimacy.
What happens in a local church is
you get into passages on “one another”, admonishing one another, encouraging
one another. You get one person on one side of the church who sees a
person on the other side of the church and they see them say or do something that
they don’t think is right. So they are immediately over there leaping from
a 4th level of intimacy situation as if it’s a first level intimacy
level situation. All they do is irritate, aggravate, and upset somebody
because they haven’t built a context of trust and intimacy to talk to the other
person. All of a sudden they’re sticking their nose in somebody’s business
where it doesn’t belong. It’s never a good situation. We always have
to be sensitive to the balance there between our friendship for someone and
also respecting their privacy.
But sometimes it’s just necessary
when someone is a friend and has been a friend and we’ve established those
kinds of conversations and relationships in the past to say, “You know I’ve
noticed this lately. I’m a little concerned.”
You make those kinds of comments and
it’s not invading someone’s privacy if they have opened the door in the past to
let us inside that circle of intimacy. There are some people who are that
way. There are also people and we know some who have a little bit
difficult time understanding the whole concept of privacy. So, you tend
to be a little resistant there.
Also within a local church you have
different personalities. You have people who are basically shy, and they
want to be private. Now a lot of times people like that will go to a
larger church because they can blend in and disappear in a church of 500 or
1000 and nobody is going to notice them. They’re very comfortable like
that. I don’t necessarily think that there’s anything wrong with
that.
What I think is wrong is when
somebody else who is very outgoing and gregarious comes along and says, “You
know you need to be more involved. You need to be coming with some events
with some other people.”
They’re imposing their views on this
other person who is just basically wants come to the church. They visit a
few times. It’s like sticking their toe in the water and they just kind of
swish it around a little bit, pull it out. A little bit later they may dip
a little more of their foot in there; but they don’t want to move in real fast
and get to know people. That’s fine. People come from all kinds of
backgrounds. A problem I see in a lot of churches and have seen (And I’ve
been in all kinds of different churches) is that there is a tendency to create
a one-size-fits-all application of Scripture like this. That’s just as
wrong.
People are so different and they
come from so many different kinds of backgrounds and histories and
personalities and everything. As we grow together and as we get to know
each other as people open themselves up to us in friendships and relationships,
then we can do more of these things in an intimate way without invading or
violating somebody’s privacy.
So we are prohibited from forsaking
the assembling of ourselves together in the framework of worshipping and
teaching as is the manner of some. But on the other hand we are to exhort
one another.
NKJ Hebrews 10:25 not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together,
as is the manner of some, but
exhorting one another, and so much
the more as you see the Day approaching.
The term “the Day approaching” is
realizing that we are getting closer and closer to the rapture of the
church. That’s not date setting. It’s still immanent, but we know and
the writer of Hebrews knew that: it’s getting close; he thought it was close,
but it really wasn’t. We know now that it is. It’s probably much
closer than it was then so it’s even more important.
Now let me just say a few comments
in terms of application and thinking through this whole issue of being involved
in a local church because we come out of a tradition (more so than other
churches and groups) point of being heavily dependent on electronic media
whether you want to call them tapers or streamers or whatever term you want to
use. We’ve all come out of that background and we all know that there are
a lot of people who have found it in a very comfortable to not to be involved
in a local church and become very isolated and sit at home watching a DVD,
watching live streaming, or listening to a tape recorder or MP3 or something of
that nature. As I pointed out earlier when I talked about it in a seminary
class, the same thing is true in a local church. There is just a certain
dynamic that occurs when we get with other believers. Furthermore there
are things that can never happen when you’re sitting home alone in front of a
tape recorder that are necessary in the body of Christ.
Notice all the images that the Lord
used of the church have to do with a unity – like a team, a body,
something like that. You can’t use your spiritual gift to benefit other
believers. And the purpose we were given spiritual gifts was to use them within
the context of a local church, not to use them in your business, not to use
them in other social groups that you’re involved in; but to use your spiritual
gift to minister in whatever area that is within the local church to one
another. If you’re not involved in a group of believers, then you can’t
function in your spiritual gift.
The second thing that’s important is
the Lord’s Table. The Lord’s Table needs to be taken on a regular basis. The
normative vision in the New Testament is that believers get together as a group
for the teaching of the Word, the observing of the Lord’s Table, praying
together, and encouraging one another. But we live in an era today where
because of technology believers can isolate themselves. They can become
spiritual islands, which are separate independent atoms that don’t ever see
each other or connect to each other. So they choose because it’s a little
bit easier because of our hectic schedules to not do that.
Now when I talk about the importance
of being involved in a local church and meeting together, I am thinking in terms
of a normative situation. I recognize that there are exceptions. But
you never teach in the light of exceptions; you teach in light of the normative
situation in a local church. I can think of all kinds of historical
exceptions. If you were living in Missouri in 1830 it was real difficult
to get together with other believers. It was real difficult to get
together with anybody because you lived 50 miles from the nearest person.
There are different historical
circumstances where it was very difficult for believers to get together with
other believers. But we’re not taking about those. You don’t set your
pattern on the basis of exceptions. You set them on the basis of normative
mandates of Scripture.
There are also people who for many
legitimate reasons just can’t attend a solid local church. Sometimes this
is because of health problems. Sometimes it might be because of financial
problems. Sometimes it may be because in their particular geographical
locality there just isn’t a church that they are comfortable with. Now
that’s another problem that I’ll address in a minute. Sometimes they’re
not comfortable with it and they need to just get over it and be involved
because of how God can use them not because of what they’re going to get. That’s
the narcissistic idea that comes up again.
“I need to go to that church and
he’s not teaching me anything.”
Well, you’re listening to Robby Dean
or Bob Thieme or somebody else 50 hours a week, you can go to that church and
ignore what the pastor says because he’s never going to feed you anything any
way.
You’re there to say, “Lord, I’m not
here as a know-it-all to give everybody the answers but I’m here because God
may use me in some way.”
Gene Brown was over at the house the
other night and Gene was talking about the fact that last spring and summer
when he was living up in Plano. I guess it was the year before that when
Phyllis was in her last two or three months. On Sunday morning he would
get up and go to the early service at what was probably the largest Baptist
church in Dallas. Gene Brown forgot more about what the Bible teaches than
that pastor ever learned. But he went to the Sunday school class. They
would waste half the hour just sitting out in the fellowship area drinking
coffee. But people would start asking Gene questions. He would just give
the answers Gene would give.
Before you know it after three or
four weeks he’s got a little group of people there that are beginning to say,
“You know you’re saying some interesting things. I’ve never heard this
before. This guy teaching Sunday school class doesn’t do this.”
I know of another case where one man
went. He wasn’t trying to show off his Bible knowledge or anything. He was
sitting in one of these Sunday school classes where the teacher who didn’t have
time to prepare would go around saying, “What do you think about this
passage? What do you think about this passage?”
So this guy realized what was going
on and so what he did he started really studying for the passage that was
supposed to come up on the Sunday school quarterly for the next week. When
the guy started asking him questions, he started giving the answers.
People would start looking and him
and say, “Where in the world did he get this stuff? This is great.”
Those who are hungry for the Word
started responding. This particular individual grew up here in Houston,
was at a doctrinal church for many years, moved up to the Dallas Fort Worth
area and goes to a church up there that is sort of a quasi-church growth
emerging church pastored by the son of a well-known pastor here in Houston so I
won’t mention his name. The church doesn’t teach anything. But they
have these little mini churches or cell groups that meet around. So he got
involved in that one. As he would be asked questions, he would tell what
he knew without any sort of arrogant attitude. Now that’s a problem that a lot
of people have. They get upset. They get irritated; they get angry
that this guy’s not teaching me anything.
“I’m going to show him.”
Well, you’ve already lost it. Go
home; get back in front of your tape recorder. You’re not going to have a
ministry with anybody because they feel that arrogance. They sense that
and they’re not going to listen to you. But he’s just very relaxed.
After about 6 months the guy who led this little group had to go on
vacation. So he asked him to take over and to teach. Now he is the guy who
teaches that group all the time. They are supposed to be limited to 20
people, but they get about 40 that come and they don’t want to split off to
another group. They’ll have pool parties and different things like that
and everybody is gathered around him asking him questions about the Bible
because they want to learn the Bible.
Bill Stebbins was listening to me
back around 2000. He was up in Kentucky. It wasn’t Fort
Campbell. He was at Fort Knox. He was teaching in the advanced armor
school there. He started listening and he said, “I can find a church.”
He tried probably a couple dozen
churches. He found a little Baptist church just outside of town that was
fairly solid. The pastor was kind of lordship. It wasn’t long before
Bill visited with him.
The guy said, “Well listen, you like
to teach. I need a Sunday school teacher. Why don’t you teach the adult
Sunday school class?”
So for the next two years Bill taught
that Sunday school class. He taught them free grace, taught them the
gospel, taught them the dynamics of the spiritual life; and they had a fabulous
ministry there. So you never know how God might use you.
One other story is a guy who works
with Morris Proctor. I just met this guy a couple of years ago. His
name is Boots. What’s his first name? Art Boots - Art and his family
grew up listening to doctrine, listening to tapes. He was in the military
4 or 5 years and got introduced to Bible Doctrine, teaching the Word. But
he knew he needed to be a part of a local church because that’s where you take
communion. That’s where you have a ministry with other believers. So
all these years he’s been involved in a local church, but he would listen to
tapes everyday. Some 8 or 10 years ago he started listening to me. Although
I don’t play a part in this (His listening to me was just tangential); but he
was wanting to know more about the original languages.
Almost anybody who sits in a
doctrinal church very long says, “I’d like to know a little Greek or Hebrew so
I can study in the original languages a little bit.”
So he found out about this program
that had come out, the Bible study program called logos. He bought Logos
and played with it and said there seems to be some horsepower under the hood;
but I don’t really know how to use it. So he just sort of put it aside. A
lot of people have had that experience. Then he heard about this guy named
Morris Proctor who was teaching these classes on how to use Logos. So he
went to one – went to two or three. Before long like most of us do
started calling Morris up on the phone and getting to know Morris – he
and his wife. He retired and he and his wife got to know Morris and his
wife personally.
Art said, “You know I’d love to help
you – just volunteer. I’d love to help you. I’d love to use
whatever God has given me to help you do this because when you teach these
classes you need people out in the audience who can help.”
Now Art and his wife travelled with
them. One day Art and his wife one weekend were staying with Morris and
Cindy. The live up in Mercury’s Borough, Tennessee and Art’s
talking. Morris told me this. He had been talking about this pastor
he had been listening to on tapes for years. "One day I just turned to him and said, 'Morris, who do
you listen to?'" "I’m listening to this guy down in Houston
named Robby Dean”
“I know Robby.”
But that’s a great ministry that Art
developed because he was willing to overlook the flaws and the shallowness at a
local church to see how God would use him. That’s important. That’s
one area of challenge to people.
But I also have some caveats that I
need to make sure that I put out here. One caveat is that there are some
people who are listening to me and they’re going to think that, “Well, there
isn’t a church around here.”
I’ve given them an excuse and
they’re going to drive a truck through it. They may go look at one church
or two churches. Looking for a church is worse than looking for a job
because there are so many of them and so many of them today are just such a
waste of time.
In fact I talked to a lady the other
day who called me and she said, “I haven’t been to church in 3 months because
it’s a waste of time.”
More and more people are unfortunately
feeling that way. There are many people who wont’ give it a try, and
they’ll use any excuse to justify their own lack of effort. But then there are
other people who are sensitive and they’ll listen to what I’ve said and they’ll
be like a guy I mentioned a couple of weeks ago who was up in Vermont. He
felt like he needed to get his kids involved in a local church and the best
church in his area in a small town didn’t even believe in the physical, bodily
resurrection of Christ.
After he’d gone there a month he
called me up and said, “You know I’m really trying to do what you said and be
involved in a local church; but they’re all terrible.
I said, “Don’t do it.”
Don’t sacrifice basic key doctrines
just to fit some legalistic idea of being involved in a local church. But
if you can, you should. Someone who can attend - I’m really addressing
this to people who can attend a solid local church; but they won’t or they
don’t because for some reason they don’t want to get up and drive 5 miles
because that’s not my favorite pastor. My favorite pastor lives three
states over. Well if that’s your favorite pastor, move three states
over. If that’s where you need to be then one of you is out of God’s
geographical will. You need to be there or that pastor needs to be
here. But God put you here to have a ministry in the body of Christ in
Houston, not to just sit at your butt at home staring at a computer screen or
listening to an MP3 player and not having any contact with any other believers
and think you’re fulfilling these mandates of “one another” in the Bible
because it’s you and your Sony tape recorder or you and your Olympus MP3 player
or you and your IPOD. Me and my IPOD….We
could make a little song like that. But people think that’s it. That
just doesn’t help you resolve these mandates related to the body of
Christ.
You can’t use distance as an
example. I had 4 or 5 people when I was in Preston City who drove. I
love being able to say this. They drove from 2 states away to come to Bible
class. They had to drive all the way through an intervening state to get
to Preston City Bible Church - each way. Of course up there Rhode Island
isn’t even the size of Houston so they came from Massachusetts and cut through
Rhode Island. We were just on the other side of Rhode Island. But it
was a 45 to 50 mile drive each way; and they rarely missed class. You
can’t use distance as an excuse.
Now it can be under certain
circumstances if you’re living someplace on the west side of Houston like I did
when I first moved back after college and I lived less than 100 yards from
where I live now and I taught in Channelview. I would have to leave at 6
o’clock in the morning and drive all the way down to Channelview. Then
when I got home about 6 o’clock at night, I still had to go to the grocery
store and laundry and everything else. There was no way I could execute
life chores and go to Bible class every night. So I’m going to listen to a
tape recorder. I still got involved in a local church because I lived just
around the corner from one and that way I was involved with a group of
believers; but I was getting all of my doctrine from where I could really get
fed doctrine. That’s the key. We need open ourselves up to different
opportunities of ministry and not isolate ourselves as believers.
That’s one thing that I think has
happened is we’ve got a certain number of believers in the doctrinal movement
who know a lot more than 95% of the other pastors that are out there. But
they would rather keep their light under a bush, hide in their room with their
tape recorder than go out and have an impact on a local church.
I’ve given you these little
anecdotes from Gene Brown and from Art Boot and several other people who have
done different things. God has used them in great ways and because of
their love for the Word it becomes contagious and infectious. There are
people in all of these churches that want to know something about the Bible.
They are so frustrated because they don’t know where to go to find out anything
about the Bible. You can be a little Jonah (I use that intentionally
because they are resistant to join us) and go to some mega church in your area
and you never know God’s going to use you because you’re not there to think
he’s going to be your pastor.
That was another question. Somebody
said, “Well, you said I need to be involved in a local church. Does that
mean I have to quit listening to you and go join this other church and not
listen to you any more?”
I said, “No. If you’ve got a local
church you can be involved in then go there on Sundays and Wednesdays. Get
to know people. But you’re not going to get fed by them. You know
that going in. You’re going to get fed from the same source you’ve been
getting fed. But you can go to that church and you can have an opportunity
there.”
Sometimes one of the little caveats
sometimes it’s just your maturity. I know that there were times in my life
when I knew that was the right thing I ought to do but I didn’t have the
maturity to do it. That wasn’t a wise thing for me to go because I came
off as being too arrogant or too irritated or too upset with the shallowness of
superficiality of whatever the Sunday school teacher was doing.
That’s a lot of unusual little
stories and ideas, but these questions keep coming up again and again. Pastors
ask these questions. People in different locations ask these
questions. We have to realize that we are all products of a narcissistic
self-oriented culture. The thing that feels most comfortable to us is to
do that which is more self-oriented than other oriented.
When you look at the Scriptures
while the emphasis is on the need for you to grow spiritual, your spiritual
growth is not the end. It is the means to an end. You look at passages
like Ephesians 4:10 or 11 that God has given these gifts (apostles, prophets,
evangelists, pastors teachers) to equip the saints so that they can have a good
spiritual life…. Is that what that said? No, it is to equip the saints to
do the work of ministry.
I think one of the things I hate is
say this is my minister. No you are my ministries. I am the equipper;
and I’m training you to have a ministry. That’s the role of the pastor to
equip the saints (the believers in the congregation) to do the work of the
ministry. Your spiritual growth is important. It’s vital. It is
the training focus so you can then go out and have that ministry. But part
of your ministry is in the local church toward one another.
So next time we will get into the
Doctrine of One Another and the Scripture says a lot about what we are to do
for one another and these are all commands. But there is a lot of
distortion. I’m going to have to explain some of these verses because
there are a lot of people who take some of these out of context easily. Some
are easily distorted. So we have to understand this that there is a
ministry that we are to have because as the Scripture says we are members one
of another. We’re not just a bunch of isolated people on different desert
islands. We are unified as a team in the body of Christ for a mission. We
have to understand that. So we’ll come back next time to continue to
understand the role of “one another.”